Industry increasingly depends upon highly automated data acquisition and control systems to ensure that industrial processes are run efficiently, safely, and reliably while lowering their overall production costs. Data acquisition begins when a number of sensors measure aspects of an industrial process and periodically report their measurements back to a data collection and control system. Such measurements come in a wide variety of forms. By way of example, the measurements produced by a sensor/recorder include: temperature, pressure, pH, and mass/volume flow of material, as well as a tallied inventory of packages waiting in a shipping line and/or a photograph of a room in a factory. Such process systems generate large and varied quantities of data which are stored in a raw form and must be processed into useful information. Ensuring that the raw data is processed into accurate information is vital for evaluating and improving the process system.